The new left: don’t call them Corbynistas

They are the leading lights of a new anti-establishment: from Take Back the City activists to Students Against TTIP, and from low-wage campaigners to Momentum supporters, meet the energised young people fighting for a different kind of politics

I’ve heard a lot about Momentum and read a lot about Momentum and seen images of the huge Momentum rallies that have taken place around the country by the time I call Momentum’s offices and talk to someone called Joe.

I’m treading carefully because I’m aware that, in certain quarters, I am what is called “the MSM”, also known as “the mainstream media”, and therefore, depending on who you talk to, at best, hopelessly biased; at worst, part of a hostile rightwing anti-Corbyn conspiracy. And in the summer of 2016, to write the words “Jeremy” and “Corbyn” sequentially in the MSM is to set a figurative match to a figurative tank of petrol and just hope it doesn’t take your eyebrows off.

It’s less than a week until the result of the most contentious leadership election in the party’s history and on the same weekend that the new leader is announced, in the same city where the Labour party conference is being held – Liverpool – Momentum, the party-within-a-party set up to support Jeremy Corbyn after his successful leadership bid last year, has organised its own conference. It’s called The World Transformed, Joe explains, because its main agenda is to change the world.

Over four days, more than 100 speakers will take the stage in a series of talks, workshops and debates: a roll call of people who, depending on who you talk to, are the emerging stars of a newly empowered radical anti-establishment or provocateurs attempting to hijack the party from within.

My plan is to profile some of the key figures, to find out who they are, where they’ve come from and what motivates them, but when I chat to Joe, the press officer for the conference, he starts trying to spin the list I’ve come up with. It’s what press officers are meant to do, of course, being hardened political hacks who after a lifetime of trying to screw the truth out of lying, evasive politicians, move over to the other side and lie and evade to other journalists on the politicians’ behalf.

Except Joe hasn’t come up via the normal route. What did you do before you worked for Momentum, I ask him. “I don’t work for Momentum,” he says. “I’m a volunteer.” He’s not a hardened political hack, it turns out, he’s a 24-year-old student called Joe Todd and is one of a small group of people who have organised the whole thing, off their own bat, unpaid. He’s doing a master’s at Goldsmiths, “but I’m not sure I’ll go back”. Why not? “Because politics is just too exciting at the moment.”

A few days later, I meet up with him and two of his fellow organisers, Natasha Josette and Jessie Hoskin. Todd was a member of Lewisham Momentum in south London and Josette and Hoskin, both single mothers, are from Stroud Momentum in Gloucestershire and, together, they talk enthusiastically about the event. The idea, Todd says, “is to take all these grassroots groups, things like the Hillsborough Justice Campaign and Disabled People Against Cuts and position them as part of a broader movement. All of these local campaigns have been going on but now they’re part of something so much bigger.”

“I was part of local community groups before,” says Josette. “But they never had that same excitement. Then Momentum happened.”

Then Momentum happened. Suddenly and dramatically, and as far as the Labour party is concerned, fatefully, last October. It’s not even a year old yet and it’s already gathered more than 17,000 paying members and seen 150 groups spring up around the country. And though it emerged from the campaign to elect Jeremy Corbyn as leader last summer, Todd insists “it’s a movement that’s so much bigger than any individual”. And yet, he claims, it’s been hopelessly misunderstood and misconstrued by the press, “Corbynista” being used against them as a term of abuse.

“Essentially, it’s ‘look at these stupid, young, naive people’. But we’re not naive at all. We’re just responding to the situation we find ourselves in. I’m relatively privileged yet I still live a really precarious existence, spending more than 70% of my income on rent. What do I want in this situation? I want change. And that’s what Jeremy and Momentum represent.”

There will be change, that much is clear. Though it remains to be seen whether it’s the kind of change that will involve Labour recovering from the Tories’ 14-point lead in the latest ICM/Guardian poll, pulling its fractured MPs together and barnstorming the next general election to a great socialist victory, or, if it’s the other kind, where the party continues to tear itself apart from within and eventually implodes. In an Islington cafe on a bright Monday morning, I meet the journalist Owen Jones, who looks depressed and tired. When I mention something about young people, he points out: “I’m 32. I know I look like a 12-year-old but the last two months has aged me.”

Owen Jones: author and journalist‘Labour is facing a potential existential crisis. People have a sense of being at war. But if this becomes an attempt by one side to conquer another, then the Labour party could just disappear as a political force. People would be fighting over who gets the ownership of the rubble.’ Photograph: Antonio Olmos/The Observer

What in particular?

“All of it? Obviously, what’s happening within Labour is pretty depressing. I’m sure the Tories have found the whole thing utterly hilarious.”

Jones became a key Corbyn ally when he made his bid for power last summer. He was there on countless stages, campaigning for him, acting as his warm-up man, stirring the crowds with a blast of rousing rhetoric before the man himself strode out to his followers.

“Yes, it’s partly that. And it’s partly people…what I find frustrating is that with, say, Ukip, political analysts and commentators will put a lot of effort into understanding why people support Ukip, what makes them tick, what are their grievances. Whereas with Corbyn supporters, what I think is fascinating is the lack of curiosity.

“You get people like the FT’s Janan Ganesh who tweeted [and later deleted]: ‘All this stuff about Corbyn and this so-called movement. The truth is they’re just as thick as pig shit.’ That’s the level of serious attention that this movement is getting.”

What’s remarkable, reading his book, is how dated it feels. In just two years, the political landscape of Britain has changed beyond recognition. And while the establishment that he talks about is still there, what we seem to be seeing is a new anti-establishment rising up to meet it. Isn’t that it?

“Yes, I think, obviously there’s a movement which is trying to offer itself as a counterweight to the dominant, ruling elite of this country and the concentration of wealth and power in the hands of very small groups of people. I think it’s an inspiring, amazing development that so many people have joined the Labour party; it’s now the biggest political party in Europe. Who would have thought that would have happened in this age? Two years ago we were talking about how the political parties were over. But the challenge now is to communicate this to the rest of the country.”

There is a shift that has taken place. But it needs to be harnessed properly

It’s this that has been preoccupying him. Because, in many ways, he is the insider-outsider. He’s never been a Corbyn spokesman, though he has acted as a Corbyn translator, an explainer of the message to the outside world. But in July, he wrote an article broadly critical of Corbyn and especially his media strategy, headlined “Questions all Jeremy Corbyn supporters need to answer”, suggesting that Corbyn may not be able to lead the country to victory without first addressing certain issues – such as, say, coming up with a strategy for persuading people to vote for him – and has been taking flak ever since.

“It’s very easy to go to rallies and think, wow! But most people don’t go to rallies, they’re not on Twitter, and if there was a snap election this October, Labour could be facing its worst defeat since 1930, no question. People have to realise that the polling is not some fabrication by a rightwing conspiracy.”

Jones is both delivering his speeches to huge crowds and genuinely fearful about where the party is heading. “If I thought five years ago that I’d be at the Reading festival talking about politics on a Sunday morning to thousands of young people as I was yesterday… I mean, things have changed. There is a shift that has taken place. But it needs to be harnessed properly because the danger is they’ll be let down if it goes wrong. Labour is facing a very real, potential existential crisis.

“There is a sense of being at war and you just have to pick a side and suppress any qualms. But if this becomes an attempt by one side to conquer another, then the Labour party could disappear as a political force. People will be fighting over who gets the ownership of the rubble.”

What’s clear is that a lot of what is going on has nothing to do with Corbyn. He’s a unifying principle, a catalyst, but those such as Amina Gichinga, an activist from east London who stood for the London Assembly in an attempt to “reclaim the city for the people who live here”, was doing what she was doing long before Jeremy Corbyn emerged on the scene. Gichinga’s organisation, Take Back the City, is trying to find ways of “doing democracy where you can participate en masse”, taking its lead from the grassroots activism of Podemos in Spain, where Ada Colau, a housing campaigner, became the mayor of Barcelona.

For her, the Corbyn moment, Momentum, The World Transformed, are all about having “a space, finally, for people to make their voices heard”. And, she hopes, the start of a “new, pluralistic kind of politics”. She studied international politics at Goldsmiths, but it was doing work experience at the House of Commons that turned her off Westminster. “All these people were getting pissed at lunchtimes, do you know what I mean? I’d see MPs out on the river terrace and I just thought, You guys live in a bubble. You don’t know who you’re working for any more.”

Emma Rees:
ex-primary school teacher turned Momentum national organiser‘If parliament was working and everyone had a good standard of living, it wouldn’t need to change. But we can’t have this separation between that circus and everyday life. Change will only come by getting more people empowered. It’s not an overnight project.’ Photograph: Antonio Olmos/The Observer

Gichinga is one of dozens of activists who are being drawn under the Momentum umbrella. Another, Zita Holbourne of Black Activists Rising Against Cuts, tells me that the current moment “feels like a turning point”. She’s a veteran of the trade union movement who’s been reanimated by Corbyn’s ascendancy and believes that “the Labour party could be reclaimed for the people”. Like many of those I talk to, she doesn’t worry about how Corbyn will win over Tory votes. She believes increasing voter turnout will be enough. “There’s thousands of new people coming out, of all ages. It’s engaging people who’ve never been interested in politics before.”

There are enterprising young people such as Cat Hobbs, of We Own It, who lobbies to bring public services back into public ownership. And a new wave of union activists like Ewa Jasiewicz, who has helped organise some of the most exploited workers in Britain – hotel cleaners.

Then there’s the new media barons of the age of Momentum. Because a whole parallel world has sprung up around the movement. It has its own language, acronyms, superstars and press. Sites such as the Canary, edited by Bristolian Kerry-Anne Mendoza, which is less than a year old but has already, Mendoza claims, overtaken the New Statesman, the Spectator and the Economist in terms of readership.

Or Novara Media, co-founded by Aaron Bastani, an activist involved in the 2010 anti-austerity and student demos in London. Bastani had just started researching a PhD on new media and politics, he tells me, when George Osborne cut half a million public sector jobs. “And there was barely a peep out of Labour but there was a protest with 3,000 people. It just really opened my eyes. It was like, Wow, this is really compelling. People are really doing something.”

Novara Media exists at an intersection of technology, direct action and politics, and it’s this that excites Bastani. “Five years ago, we didn’t think the existing political structure would adapt to new media. We thought they’d be too fuddy duddy. So seeing all this going on with Labour, all these adaptations, this invigoration, I just find it fascinating.

“I went to my local CLP meeting where we nominated Jeremy Corbyn and it was a huge meeting, 300 people, who’d also been discussing it on Facebook, on WhatsApp, on Twitter. There’s a whole new layer that has been bolted on and I think that’s really new and is happening at scale, nationally. There were nine people at the meeting last year, apparently. And now it’s 300 people and it’s black, white, young, old. And it is really local democracy. Whether it’s going to sustain, I don’t know, but it’s happening.”

In a smartly appointed youth centre in Halifax, I watch a group of around 30 people, aged 18 to seventysomething, getting to grips with new technology. Adam Klug, one of the four core team members at Momentum, is explaining to the group how to use a piece of phone-banking software that the Bristol branch of Momentum has developed. It allows volunteers to access the phone numbers of Labour party members and lobby them from their own homes. “I used to work in a call centre selling mobile phones,” he says. “But this is very different. You’re having a discussion with people and as long as you are polite and respectful it can be a very positive experience.”

Before the campaign invented the app, volunteers had to go to a central phone bank office and call from there but now, as one member of the audience tells the others, “I used it when I was still in bed.”

“We’ve picked up a lot from the Bernie Sanders campaign,” Klug tells me. It’s a new type of grassroots techno-activism that is applying the tricks and strategies of social media and social networking to a party founded in the age of steam – whether it wants it or not. In Silicon Valley-ese, Momentum is disrupting the Labour party.

Adam Klug: ex-primary school teacher turned Momentum national organiser‘Last summer, Emma and I were primary school teachers in Birmingham and we’d decided to move to Barcelona to teach English for a bit. We volunteered for Jeremy Corbyn’s campaign and then just got more and more involved. This isn’t about Corbyn. It’s much bigger than that. It’s a whole new social movement.’ Photograph: Antonio Olmos/The Observer

And it’s this that’s the problem, according to Richard Angell, the director of Progress, a Blairite pressure group within the Labour party. “When the Labour party was founded it was not founded to be the British socialist party. It was not founded to be a social movement. There was a social movement at its foundation, they’re called trade unions[…] What was founded was a party that was about getting working-class people into parliament on the belief that the more normal the people making decisions, the better those decisions would be for normal people.”

The idea that the Labour party should be a mass social movement is, for him, a fundamental misunderstanding about its central role. The Momentum conference, The World Transformed, is further evidence of the group’s ambition to cannibalise the Labour party and then destroy it. “It’s not a party-in-a-party but a party waiting to leave a party,” he wrote in the latest edition of Progress magazine. “Its national executive, trade union affiliations, membership processes, its conference alongside Labour conference and data on Labour members – harvested by the private companies set up to run Corbyn’s leadership campaigns – all look like the precursor to an asset strip of the Labour party.”

He points to the fact that Momentum may look and act like a grassroots organisation, but it’s actually that most capitalist of things, a private company, the successor to “Jeremy Corbyn Campaign 2015 (Supporters) Limited” – a private company with one director, Jon Lansman, a 59-year-old activist and longtime friend of Jeremy Corbyn, who once worked on Tony Benn’s leadership campaign.

It’s a good point, though arguably Progress isn’t the organisation to make it since it, too, is a limited company. “For which we were heavily criticised,” he points out. “They put forward these fresh-faced young people but the founder and owner of Momentum is Jon Lansman. This is a man who has terrorised the Labour party for years. It’s his life’s work to get mandatory reselection. The strategy is based on getting rid of Labour MPs not Tory ones.”

It’s probably not a coincidence that I’m not offered Lansman to interview. I get Adam Klug and Emma Rees, the two national organisers, who couldn’t be more unshadowy. They were primary school teachers in Birmingham until last summer and gave up their jobs to go to Barcelona to teach English and happened to volunteer for Corbyn’s campaign while staying in London for the summer with Klug’s family. They got sucked in and when Momentum was founded, they became two of the four people at the heart of it (as well as Lansman, there is a journalist, James Schneider).

“We found ourselves in a bizarre situation where we were due to move to Barcelona five days later. We’d actually already paid the deposit on a flat,” Klug tells me over his dinner, a sad-looking pasta salad at Greggs in Wakefield station.

He could be eating tapas in the sun, I point out, instead of trekking around cities in the north of England. “I know,” he says. “But we felt like our values and political views or whatever were being lived out. For the first time we felt completely motivated to throw ourselves into something completely political.”

It’s hard to regard Klug as anything other than committed and genuine. And it’s not quite the Corbyn love-in, I’d expected. “Going forward, this should be about reshaping British politics and bringing in a new leader,” he says.

Rees, softly spoken and understated, is perhaps even less strident. I’ve been told she’s a hardcore Trot, the daughter of John Rees, the former national secretary of Respect, George Galloway’s outfit, and intent on nothing less than destroying the Labour party. It’s a charge I put to her, though it turns out to be nothing more than gossip.

Paul Mason: writer and ex-Channel 4 economics editor‘I quit Channel 4 in March because if you’ve written a book that gets translated into 16 languages that says, ‘neoliberalism is shit and it’s doomed’, there’s a very limited attraction in sitting across a desk from a bunch of neoliberal businessmen, nodding in agreement when they tell you how great the system is.’ Photograph: Antonio Olmos/The Observer

“My dad’s a car park attendant in Cardiff airport. He’s not interested in politics at all. It’s interesting, isn’t it, how these stories take on a life of their own?” For her, the issue, or at least one of the issues, is “the Labour party being divorced from communities and from people’s lived experiences” and finding a way of reaching them in a way the party has failed to do. We’re talking at Momentum’s HQ, inside the TSSA trade union building in Euston, and an 18-year-old volunteer, Beth Foster-Ogg, who’s been working for the campaign full time since April, wanders through looking for coffee. “Look,” says Rees as Foster-Ogg drifts by, smiling. “Another of our Trotskyite infiltrators.”

It’s a joke but it does point to the problem in the media coverage of Momentum. I email a prominent Corbyn critic to ask him what questions I should ask them, and he emails back: “Ask them: why don’t you just fuck off and join the Tories?” That’s a joke too. But in Halifax, the local organiser of the Momentum group, Carol Machell, another “revolutionary” type – a retired headteacher and former Ofsted inspector – is not joking when she describes the way she has been described in the press as “insulting”. She joined the party after Corbyn was elected last year simply because “I really wanted to do something about the Tories. We’re called lots of names and we’re labelled ‘naive’ and they say that we’re having our arms twisted by other people. But we are ordinary, thinking people who want a more equal and a better society. It really is so patronising to suggest we’re gullible idiots being led.”

The last person I interview is Paul Mason, the ex-economics editor of Channel 4 News, who has become one of the movement’s chief ideologues. He’s the author of one of its key texts, PostCapitalism, and his thesis is that it all began back in 2011. “There was the eruption of all these network protests, so Occupy, the Arab spring, the Indignados in Spain… which went on to become Podemos winning 20% of the vote. Then you saw Syriza come to power in Greece. And then Bernie Sanders. And I place the Corbyn phenomenon and what we’ve lived through in the last year of this mass membership upsurge very centrally within that.”

As General Sherman said in the American civil war: ‘You’ve chosen war. We’re going to give you all the war you can take'

As it happens, 2011 was also when I interviewed him last, and we meet in the same Soho cafe. Mason still drinks multiple cups of cappuccino but everything else has changed. The pinstriped suit has gone, along with the need to try and at least appear impartial. He’s now in jeans, stubble and giving off a palpable sense of purpose. He’s not quite the movement’s Jagger but he’s one of the headliners, a star act, punching through on Twitter, appearing at the rallies, top of the bill at The World Transformed – though he’s no Corbynista. “On the night we won the NEC decision that allowed him on to the ballot paper, I was at a rally in Camden. There was a thousand people in the room cheering on Corbyn, shouting: ‘We love Jeremy!’ and I shocked them by saying: ‘I don’t give a shit about Jeremy Corbyn!’ To me, he is a good guy, I support him, but he’s a placeholder for a different kind of politics.”

It’s this different kind of politics that’s energising him. In America, he says, “what the Occupy generation chose to do was to occupy the Democratic party and that’s effectively what the people who don’t like neoliberal capitalism have chosen to do here: to occupy the Labour party.”

That’s interesting, I say, because that’s exactly what Richard Angell of Progress says is happening. Only the word he uses is “hijack”.

“I’m quite glad about that, though all we’re really doing is reclaiming it.”

But at what cost? Won’t it split the party?

“We, on the left of the party, didn’t want this fight. But it’s like what General Sherman said in the American civil war: ‘You’ve chosen war. We’re going to give you all the war you can take.’”

It’s a slightly chilling answer. I have drunk the infectious excitement and hope of Todd and Josette and Hoskin, and been impressed by the dynamism of Gichinga and Klug and Rees. But Mason’s vision – “I want to lay waste to the whole neoliberal hierarchical tradition that Blairism and Brownism represented” – feels like something else entirely. Blitzkrieg. Total warfare. Shock and awe. I walk through Soho wondering, what about the rest of us? The civilians who didn’t choose this fight either. And what will be left standing when the shock and awe is over?

• This article was amended on 18 September 2016. In an earlier version of the article we mistakenly called Ada Colau Ana Colau. This has been corrected.